The text coupon (“IReadOSNews”) that entitles you to freely download the LindowsOS 4.5 Developer Edition will expire today, Friday, January 23rd, at 2:00 PM Pacific Time, so you only have an hour (as I write this) to get it (you can download it later, but you need to go through the procedure of getting it before time’s up). More information about the text coupon and how to use it, read our recent interview with Kevin Carmony of Lindows.com. Update: Time’s up folks!
Lindows.com’ OSNews Text Coupon Will Expire Today
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Sorry I didn’t post this notification earlier today. I slept at 5:30 AM this morning (doing stuff on my slackware all night) and then I woke up at 11:45 AM (I posted this story at 12:41 PM PST). Kevin from Lindows.com had sent his email at 10 AM already to notify me about the expiration, but I was sleeping at the time.
Is this an expiration for downloading or to “buy” it? I have already “bought” it, but have had a LOT of trouble getting it to download. Their server has been so bogged down that I keep getting bumped “out of the line” periodically and have to restart.
I have been having difficulty DLing it as well. So is it BUY or Download?
This is an expiration of the feature letting you downloading it for free. To get it for free, you need to enter our text coupon “IReadOSNews” (click the coupon link in their “view cart” page) and click “update” in the coupon webpage. Note: You will need to create a shop account with lindows.com to do all that.
You can always buy it for real if you want ($60 USD), but to download it for free, you only have 55 minutes left.
Before we were told that we could enter the coupon code and come back at anytime in the future to download this, and we were asked not to hammer their servers. So I have not even attempted to download it, I simply registered and made sure the option is available to download it later. I was thinking at some point next week I’d try.
Is this a reversal? Does this mean the option to download it from within the account will expire?
I got in there yesterday and downloaded, though it took all night. A heck of a deal, and a great way to get people like me to check them out.
I’d always said that I wouldn’t use Lindows because of the upfront purchase before I could try it. Well, no excuse now…
Definately will purchase a full membership/CNR account if it looks good. What the heck, I’ve got three or four Mandrake box sets (and a red hat or two)so what’s another $100 for a good OS…
Also I was quite impressed by the forums over there at Lindows. They tried to keep it civil (even to the trolls) and gave out info in a manner that doesn’t alienate the new user. Can’t say that for many other Linux web sites.
Come on clock, I need to get home and get this put on one of the computers! And all the rest of you people have 45 minutes, so let’s get cracking!
<Hmm, Picturing Eugenia jumping out of her skin trying to get this posted fast so we won’t all give her hell…>
> Does this mean the option to download it from within the account will expire?
I don’t know about this. It depends how their shopping site works internally. OSNews did say that you have two days to use the coupon, and this was true. However, regarding “get it now, store it to the shop’s session and download it later”, I do not know. Ask Kevin for that.
My understanding is that it is the “purchase of a membership” and you will be able to download at any time. This also means that you can download it again later if you screw up your disk or blow up your computer.
Better get in there boys and girls! Tick, Tick, Tick…
I contacted them and they said as long as you have it on your My-Lindows My Products page you can download anytime.
You should have an email with a receipt of the 0 balance sale.
This is a not a reversal. ONly the coupon expires shortly. After you enter the coupon, the iso’s stay in your account for life. You can download the os 4 years from now when Lindows rules the desktop.
“You can download the os 4 years from now when Lindows rules the desktop.”
I was wondering, about that, this memebership doesn’t entitle everyone to unlimited upgrades (LOS 5.0 etc) does it?
That would be the deal of the century. (And I’d probably wet my pants in joy!)
Couldn’t get it to install. Installation went fine (on both PCs) but it never booted up.
I wasn’t interested because it wasn’t truly free. They wanted personal information and a credit card #. Not me.
In didn’t need to enter a credit card number. That is only if you get the 15 day trial.
No they don’t want credit card #, I’ve never had a credit card in my life, and I signed up and downloaded.
When you get to the point where it asks if you want to sign up for the 14.95 a month membership, just click on the “my products”(or words to that effect)link on the left side of the page. Then click on My downloads and there you are. In effect you are already signed up and ready to download.
They make that page more confusing than it should be…
You can get the shipped version by entering the code, but you have to pay the $10 difference and the $6.50 shipping.
I wasn’t interested because it wasn’t truly free. They wanted personal information and a credit card #. Not me.
My goodness, you people… Just because the rather simple task of downloading this was beyond your level of understanding, you blame Lindows.
I downloaded the ISO, no problem. Never once did it ask for my credit card number (for the ISO download) or any other form of payment. There were many opportunities to enter your credit card number, if you wanted to subscribe to CnR, for example. However none of these were required.
As was mentioned countless times in the previous thread; First you purchase the “Developer” download edition, using the coupon code. The total will be $0.00, no credit card number required. Then go to “My Lindows” tab at the top of the screen, then “My Products”, then “CD Downloads.”
It’s really not difficult folks! I had hoped the average OSNews reader would be able to figure this out…
“I had hoped the average OSNews reader would be able to figure this out…”
No that is why we are getting Lindows! heh heh…
Thanks for the more precise directions!
10 minutes! arghhhh! Hurry!
Here’s how the promotion works/worked. You’ve gone to the lindows in the last few days and selected to buy lindows 4.5 developer edition. You type in “ireadosnews” as a coupon and it’s worth $55 (the price of the software). Then you checkout, which requires you to register with them (it doesn’t require a credit card number). At this point you can download the software at anytime by going to “My Lindows”.
The credit card number confusion is when They offer you 14 days of Click-and-Run for free. Of course after 14 days they bill you for a year, you may click cancel at this point, and still download the ISOs.
And For Anyone Who’s Interested:
THE CURRENT DOWNLOAD LINE IS AT 765!!!
OSnews must have a big audience 🙂
>OSnews must have a big audience 🙂
Yup, for this month we are averaging about 168,000 page views per day. Bigger than ever.
Its on the edonkey/emule network.
I know this is not that clean, but how many times guys copy the MS core font to their linux partition ?
It says the coupon expired already…
Oh, I’m sad ! I came to late, I didn’t get it 🙁
If anyone has any problems installing Lindows on an older computer, and the BIOS either doesn’t support booting from CD, or fails everytime you try (I had the latter problem) I highly recommend a combo of Smart Boot Manager from http://btmgr.sourceforge.net and a bootdisk from http://bootdisk.com after booting from the floppy the first time, run ‘smbinst -d 0’ and then reboot, when it starts booting from the floppy it will give you the choice of where to boot from, including the CD.
Yea I tried yesterday to download 5 times all resulting in errors and again today. “Yea”
http://www.desktopos.com/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=1
try with the standard edition, not the developer one. code is: “IReadDesktopOS”
Worked for me.
-Vecc
bittorrent
“I wasn’t interested because it wasn’t truly free. They wanted personal information and a credit card #. Not me.”
That’s funny. Did you let bias blind you?
It was said repeatedly that you didn’t need to give those details, it was explained in detail by Kevin Carmony step by step for those who were not able to figure it out and you’re still saying this.
I got it no problem and then saw people saying you need to give CC and some even saying they had paid for it and I was wondering if you couldn’t figure out how to download the OS how on earth were you going to burn it to ISO and use it…
The site could do with some rework but c’mon people, it wasn’t that difficult.
I eventually managed to download both the Developer’s Edition and the Live CD (quite why they don’t call it a “Live CD” though is anyone’s guess !) of Lindows 4.5. I’ve just tried the Live CD first (disappointed that they are using Lilo, when grub is such a better alternative, but I digress) – am I the only one who saw loads of missing file/can’t load messages during the Live CD booting (when doing the “Diagnostic” boot, which is the text-mode boot) ?
It did boot into the desktop (defaults to US keyboard when I had a UK one and I had to tweak a few things [monitor frequency in particular]) and it seemed to be a reasonable “clone attempt” at the XP look and feel. Can’t say I liked them renaming Mozilla as the “Lindows Internet Suite” (huh?!) and I’m not a fan of the ORBit theme [Modern is much nicer, IMHO], but it seemed to do the job. Only real niggle I had with the Live CD was that it doesn’t eject when you shut down the machine (Knoppix does) – meaning you’ve got to power up the machine again, eject the CD via the drive’s button take the CD out, then power it off again, hopefully all before your normal boot sequence kicks in. They need to fix this issue in the next Live CD release really.
My overall impression was that Lindows is a fairly slick desktop for newbies to move to who have previously only been on Windows (this is not a niche market – it’s probably about 80%-85% of the entire desktop users in the world) and the fact that Lindows have managed to get it pre-installed on PCs (sadly none for sale in the UK it seems !) with some big stores such as Wal-Mart is impressive.
I might have a go at installing Lindows 4.5 “for real”, but the lilo issue is putting me off a bit cos I use grub for my partitions. Anyone any idea if the Developer’s CD lets you use grub or will I have to install lilo and then overwrite it with grub again [complete with grub conf hacks to boot into Lindows] ? If a distro insists on using lilo for their boot manager, they should have an option (even if it’s hidden in an “advanced” section) for using grub instead.
Lindows.com is still there (I had wondered if they’d be “slashdotted” when news of this promotion leaked beyond the confines of this site) but the queue is massive.. I’m still over 100th in line
I have usually viewed Lindows with a degree of suspicion but I now hope they make it – as this big giveaway will have cost them a fortune in bandwidth charges.
Is anyone else having trouble accessing Lindows forums at forum.lindows.com
I assume I’m not the only one with the problem…
Also, I agree, the process was confusing and I ended up with web site problem responses more than the number times I would normally put up with. Whenever I download this thing and test it, I hope it was worth the time. I’m curious about Lindows, but not curious enough to pay for it. Plus, my curiosity tends to wane when I read that Linux still has the characteristics I dislike about it… Anyway… thanks for the coupon, OSNews.com!
If their download process is any indication of the quality of their software I have no interest in it. After repeated attempts at trying to download, and getting from 300+ down to top 10 – or even getting the link – it always broke down.
It is no longer free in my mind – it cost me over an hour of my time – which as a consultant is worth over $200.00.
I might as well pay Microsoft the $179.00 for Windows XP and be on my way.
If you were working you wouldn’t be surfing for freebies.
After a try or two and about an hour in total mine connected and downloaded in a single 5 hour burst.
lol you could have bought Lindows it for 60$ and be on your way too…
1. Only using the coupon code to create your free account is what has expired. If you used the coupon code before it expired, then you have unlimited access to download the .iso files ANYTIME.
2. Again, we apologize for any problems with downloading. Our servers have been running full steam since we announced the coupon. We have a lot of capacity, but we had thousands of people take advantage of this offer.
3. This will not give you access to 5.0 later this year. Only CNR Members get free updates to subsequent versions. ALL users get any security updates.
Thanks everyone!
Kevin Carmony
President, Lindows.com, Inc.
I burned it but when I tried to see its contents it locked up my CD-ROM. I’m afraid I might have gotten a bad burn, as my MD5 is different from the web site – however I don’t know if the web site MD5 is up-to-date.
My MD5 sum, according to K3b:
6f0e31bdc26ca7f35c9b12e9022b4107
The MD5 sum given on the website:
553d44a718edb365506b679ee964e105
mine matches.. so i guess you got a bad burn or a bad download.
I had a bad download. Just checked the new download and it matches. Thanks!
I have the same problem like one of the posters before.
Install is ok, but at booting it stops after about 3/5 of the “bars”. Just no progress any more. If I use diagnostic boot up, it boots through to the graphics, but I need to confirm a few questions during boot.
I’ll probably stick to some more “free” or standard linux version, but I wanted to check what a most commercial version might be like.